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Hear poet James Giddings read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. James Giddings back next the poet Born in Johannesburg and now living in Sheffield in the north of England, James Giddings is the author of Everything is Scripted , published in 2016 by Templar Poetry. the poems Look inside 00:00 / 01:00 At the base of the back of my neck is the button you press to get a look inside. One firm push with your thumb and FWIP! my head pops back like the top of a kettle and a noise strikes the same tone as a microwave casserole when it’s cooked, a mushroom cloud of steam ballooning from the neck hole of my thin cigarette body. Once you’ve released all that hot air, take a peek, you’ll see there’s not much there: no gold elements, no dial tone of great intellect, just a feeling, as if staring down a deep ravine. There seems as if there’s no end to it, until you throw something down and a sound calls back from the bottom. There are versions of us in alternate universes 00:00 / 01:37 One where we’re partners on a buddy cop show who stand back-to-back with our guns raised as our theme tune swells to a crescendo and the screen detonates, our names exploding out of picture. Another where we bloom on trees like bright fruit and our lives are spent waiting for the great fall. Then there’s the one where I am your father and you are my son, and you are crying because you’re hungry and I am crying because I can’t get the car seat to bloody fit, but we stop, for a few seconds, each of us near silent when we catch the eyes of the other. One where we are giant glass shards reflecting. Another where we are bank robbers, our ears pressed against a safe door like expectant fathers listening for a heartbeat. Another where we wait in a long line for the entrance to Hell and both complain about how long it’s taking. And even though I know there are worse universes than ours, I can’t shake the one in which each night you tell me all the unextraordinary words you know like spam , hardcopy and telemarketer, then right before you leave, say a couple of extraordinary ones, which are only so because of how rarely I’ve heard you utter them in this world. No requests 00:00 / 01:55 I’m working on my vanishing act, an homage to my father. To learn more I attend a show where the magician starts by sawing a ladle in half. To further subvert the genre he pulls a hat out of a rabbit, places the rabbit on his head like a toupee and shaves it into oblivion with a set of clippers, leaving the cue ball of his bald head shining. Do the one where the father disappears and you bring him back on stage! I heckle, but he doesn’t do requests. Next he does a card trick entirely with birthday cards, which, in a feat of anti-gravity, levitates the heart in my chest. With love , one reads, then his signature, a single kiss. Impressed, I shout, do the one where you bring back the father! But he still doesn’t do requests. Next he stretches a ten pence piece leaving the Queen’s face visibly frustrated. Then he solves a Rubik’s cube by throwing it behind his back; it is so convincing and easy, I hope a policeman might hand him a murder case. I rise from my seat, plead, please do the one where you bring back the father! He gestures off-stage theatrically, magics up security and I’m escorted out through a plain grey door. No traps. No secret panels. I never got to see the big finish, whether he did the trick, but I waited anyway, checking every face that left the auditorium, hopeful he had pulled it off. Publishing credits Look Inside: exclusive first publication by iamb There Are versions of Us in Alternate Universes: Poetry Wales (Vol. 56, No. 2) No Requests: Poetry London (Issue 97)

Hear poet Michele Grieve read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Michele Grieve back next the poet Michele Grieve was Poet in Residence for The Urban Tree Festival 2022/23, and a recipient of funds from Arts Council England's Developing Your Creative Practice. She graduated from the Faber Academy Advanced Poetry Course in 2023, and has had work published by WildFire Words , Obsessed With Pipework and Anthropocene . Currently collating her first poetry pamphlet, Michele can be found hugging trees, her five cats and her family in Hertfordshire, where she's also undertaking Bardic training. the poems Sunday Roast with My Family 00:00 / 00:57 At our faux Chippendale dining table, Marie Antoinette stabs her wig-mice with scarlet talons if they try for a morsel of her stuffing. Her head lolls to one side, we’re midway through my revolution. It wasn’t a clean strike. Plasma and cells sprint to flavour the gravy. To her right the shadow-man loiters, his wispy nervous edges flicker like the memory of remorse, unsure where they should end. He slices off each finger because he can. He cannot remember the last time he saw his own face. The brother who denies his blood lurks under the table, eating dog fur off the Axminster, trying to angle a view up my skirt. No one stops him. I say nothing. The cosplay mother calls me by my dog’s name then feeds him her breast. ACT TWO: 'THE TWENTY-YEAR SCRIPT' 00:00 / 02:20 GENRE: PSYCHOLOGICAL HORROR CHARACTERS: MOTHER (54) SWAN-NECKED, HER SPINE CLINGS TO A MEMORY OF DIGNITY BUT NOW HAS CLOSED RANKS AROUND HER HEART. AN ECHO CAN BE HEARD OF A 'WELL-PUT-TOGETHER' WOMAN, YET BLOTCHY FOUNDATION REVEALS YESTERDAY’S FACE. THE ONCE 'ELIZABETH TAYLOR' HAIR NOW MATTED WITH ELNET, BATTLING TO RETAIN ORDER. DAUGHTER (20) A WEIGHTY PHYSIQUE OF A BODY WEARING ITS SHAME. BAREFACED, HER HAIR IS MID-LENGTH-LANKY WITH PREMATURE WHISPERS OF GREY. DESPITE THE CIMMERIAN SHADE, HER EYES HAVE A GLINT OF ÉLAN VITAL. NO ONE KNOWS HOW THIS IS POSSIBLE. SETTING: 1930s house, stands alone, held captive by two villages, each a mile away, both too far to seek help at 4am. The untamed garden to the front has a semicircular drive, allowing no one to ever truly arrive, or leave. A maternal willow tree reaches roots under the house, raising concrete and concern. The living room is coated with nicotine and anger. Everywhere is busy. Every room is loud. Faded school photographs offer a nostalgia for obedience. The red velour sofa is draped with lace antimacassars; once delicate and white, now tired and soiled. An anxious Axminister lay buried under decades of dander and despair. Sofa reclined; the mother catches up with friends on Coronation Street . An ashtray erupts beside her whisky, both work in unison to flavour the air. The daughter smokes her dummy. Mother: (peeling her eyes off the screen) Prefer your fringe to the side, it’s far more slimming. (Daughter drags on her fag to cauterize her wound. Mother sips whisky to anesthetize her everything.) Mother: (eyes glued back on the screen) I’ll make you a mango Slimfast for tea. The scene repeats ad infinitum without intermission. Gen P 00:00 / 00:44 We stay awake, just in case, like those 'poorly nights' when they were a babe, except so very not. The universe felled, they schooled themselves to swallow fear, breathing broken glass, no memory of air. 2020 liquified my children’s insides, and pain cannot leave without a name. I know of a woman who found her son hanging in his room. He used his school tie. So, we stay awake, just in case, longing for those 'poorly nights' when they could scream and cry. Publishing credits Sunday Roast with My Family / ACT TWO: 'THE TWENTY-YEAR SCRIPT': exclusive first publication by iamb Gen P: Obsessed With Pipework (No. 107)

Hear poet Thomas McColl read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Thomas McColl back next the poet Thomas McColl lives in London and has published two collections of poetry – Being With Me Will Help You Learn and Grenade Genie . He's read as a featured poet at many events in London and elsewhere, including Hearing Eye , Paper Tiger Poetry , Celine's Salon and The Quiet Compere . Thomas has also been featured on East London Radio, BBC Radio Kent, BBC Radio WM and TV's London Live. the poems Susan Sharp 00:00 / 00:59 Susan Sharp was what my first employer, the local butcher, called the knife he’d use to slice the meat. By way of explanation, he said he spent more time with Susan than he ever did with his wife. ‘Tis pity she’s a knife,' he’d joke, but most of the time he was simply singing Susan’s praises – saying how much he loved her serrated, lop-sided smile, her blood-red lipstick, her lust for naked carcasses, and the ease with which she’d split a heart in two, yet always give in to his demands. On my first day, he threatened to slice off my hands when I went to touch her. ‘There’s only one commandment in a butcher’s shop,’ he scowled. ‘Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s knife.’ Working at that butcher’s shop was my first job, and I didn’t even manage to last a week with that paranoid psycho freak, and Susan Sharp, his knife, who he’d fallen in love with and spent more time with than he ever did with his wife. Look at That! 00:00 / 01:01 'Daddy – look at that! a top hat on a tea pot,' you shout, as we stop just a little too close to a china display in the shop and, with a swipe of your hand, you make a fat pot-headed Victorian gentleman involuntarily doff his hat, and a second later, you realise why he doesn't do that – even though he's Victorian and you're a lady (albeit a little madam) – when his hat (which, foolishly, he'd had made out of posh china rather than plush silk) smashes into pieces on the floor. And while you sob and sulk at the realisation, I pay the bill for the damage, while keeping an eye out, as I'm carrying you, that you don't knock any of the many ornate objects crowded round the till, but instead your damned dinky destructive digit starts prodding the top of my face, and my invisible top hat (which, foolishly, I'd had made out of frayed nerves rather than woven silk) is once more pushed to the edge, and once more (just about) remains in place. Hard Tears 00:00 / 00:43 I often cried in front of you – sometimes when you hit me, once when, as you were teaching me to ride a bike, you let go of the handlebars and losing control I fell off, and once, when teaching me DIY, you gave me a heavy claw hammer to bang some nails into wood and I proceeded to bang my thumb instead. ‘For Pete’s sake!’ you said, disgusted. ‘You’re thirteen. Don’t you think it’s about time you managed to resist the urge to blub like a girl every time you get hurt?’ Well, I never cried in front of you again – not even years later at your funeral. Though I was devastated, the tears just wouldn’t come. I wish you could have seen it. You’d have been proud. Publishing credits Susan Sharp: Co-incidental 4 (The Black Light Engine Room) Look at That!: Ink, Sweat & Tears Hard Tears: Burning House Press

Hear poet Aaron Caycedo-Kimura read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Aaron Caycedo-Kimura back next the poet Aaron Caycedo-Kimura is a poet, painter, and cartoonist whose poetry has appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal , Poet Lore , DMQ Review , Tule Review , Louisiana Literature , The Night Heron Barks, and elsewhere. Aaron earned his MFA in creative writing from Boston University and is a recipient of a Robert Pinsky Global Fellowship in Poetry. With Ubasute , he won the 2020 Slapering Hol Press Chapbook Competition. the poems Family Anthem 00:00 / 01:11 I walk into the garage from side door sunlight ELO on my Walkman my eyes dissolve the darkness to discover my parents locked in a slow-dance embrace whispering to each other like lovers but my parents aren’t lovers they’re Japanese never kiss hold hands say I love you not even to me once I asked Mom if she loved me she replied my mother and father never said it but I knew they did my parents hear my shuffle separate like guilty teenagers she escapes into the house he into the Ford opens the garage door I fumble forget what I was looking for but all afternoon replay that dissonant chord What’s Kept Alive 00:00 / 01:27 She crunches her walker into the sea of pebbles surrounding the stepping-stones, tells me, This bush with flowers is Japanese. That one is too, but different. I hover close behind, ready with an outstretched arm as if to give a blessing. Pick that large weed near the lantern —by the roots — and throw it into the pail. My father planned and planted this garden fifty years ago— hidden behind the fence of their Santa Rosa tract home— but he’s gone now. She hires a hand to rake leaves, prune branches once a month. Soon she’ll be gone. I’ll sell the house, return to Connecticut. A stranger will buy it, become caretaker of the garden, but won’t know that from their San Francisco apartment my father transported the Japanese maple, cradled in a small clay pot — the momiji now guarding the north corner— and that my mother chided him for bothering with a dying shrub. The Hardest Part 00:00 / 01:50 The fire truck siren downstairs raided the air of my mother's dreams. She'd scream in her sleep , my father told me, even after we married. More than a decade past the Second World War— for him, American concentration camps, for her, the firebombing of Tokyo— they moved into a San Francisco apartment that rented to Japs, a one-bedroom walk-up above the Post Street fire station. They painted their bathroom black— It was in style then— shelved books, unboxed a new rice cooker, watered a shrub of Japanese maple potted for their future garden. When the station got a call in the middle of the night, the rumble of the overhead door crumbled into the wreck that was once her home. Swirling lights flashed ancient trees into flames through the thin silk curtains of her eyelids. No warning, no drill, no cover. My father stilled her body, his broad hand on her shoulder or hip as they lay in the dark listening to the slowing of her breath. The hardest part of those nights , he said, was waiting— sometimes hours—for the truck and the men to come back. Publishing credits Family Anthem: DMQ Review What’s Kept Alive / The Hardest Part: Hartford Courant

Hear poet Ruth Taaffe read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Ruth Taaffe back next the poet Hailing from Manchester and having lived variously in Sheffield, Thailand, Australia and Singapore, Ruth Taaffe is now settled in the south of England. She writes about her experiences of living overseas, the idea of home, and how the natural environment finds its way into our identity. Ruth has taught English internationally for more than 20 years, and has a Masters degree in Creative Writing from Lancaster University. Her poems have appeared in such literary journals as The Poetry Village , Acumen and One Hand Clapping , and her debut collection is Unearthed . the poems Driving Over the Snake Pass Under a Shed with a Goldfish on my Lap 00:00 / 01:04 These were the final items to repatriate taken over the hills to my first home – the cats had gone ahead two weeks before. Young enough to still depend on parents, we knew the baggage that we did not take could be left at their door and kept for us. Tied to the roof rack like a tortoise shell, the shed, unconstructed, was just boards of wood. I peered skyward as you drove, for any shift in light foreshadowing some avalanche of splinters. We kept the radio off, tuned in to creaking and the steady slosh of fish water that I was powerless to stop. We had no idea how our life would be rebuilt a thousand miles away, or why fish, when moved into some larger water, grow. Acrobat 00:00 / 01:23 He toes the wire which sways like a hammock, outstretches his knotted arms of rope. Ears ringed gold as a sailor of air. His back and chest inked by compass, star. Fixing his eye low on the horizon where he’ll land in time with our ovation, he climbs the unicycle, inches backwards, slowly unwalking the plank. We buoy him up with our applause, become his crew, his wave and tide, life vest of his triumph. And he ours. Four clubs fly like seagulls mobbing a fish, or words trying to land on a line. Each catch sharpens our awe. Then, he’s passed a fifth on fire! We stow the clapping, trade in calm. For this moment we anchor him with our belief, as the solo drumbeats start. He catches in time, leaps to land, and signs a charter of hope on our hearts. Nightjar 00:00 / 00:58 Squat like a knot of dark upon dark at the edge of dusk. Folded blades of downed chopper, landed mound of bark and leaves. Your snake eye opens up like a moon glassing the night. Bug-eater lacking fangs to pierce the nocturne skin, only your baleen beak sifting plankton from the sky, flat as an unsent valentine. You shoot soft tuts of fireworks cluck up Morse code. Heart monitor for the forest, it was told that you stole milk from goats, but you preserve such sweetness, Chupacabra. Open wide, let the world pour its song back into your throat. Publishing credits Driving Over the Snake Pass Under a Shed with a Goldfish on my Lap: 192 Magazine Acrobat: exclusive first publication by iamb Nightjar: Finished Creatures (The Poetry Village)

wave nineteen autumn 2024 Christoper Arksey Corinna Board Frances Boyle Julie Stevens Kerry Darbishire Laura Theis

wave four winter 2020 Amelia Loulli

wave eighteen summer 2024 A R Williams

wave six summer 2021

wave ten summer 2022

wave one spring 2020 Ankh Spice

wave fifteen autumn 2023 Abigail Lim Kah Yan

wave nine spring 2022

wave three autumn 2020 Aaron Kent

wave eleven autumn 2022